Dear Editor,
About a kilometer or so south of Kemptville lies an unused few acres of arable land. Unlike the thousand odd acres of arable land scattered around Ontario, this piece of land is to become infamous over the next few years.
The land legally belongs to the province of Ontario and the legally elected Ontario government has decided that this should be the site of a new prison.
As the government of Ontario is the highest planning authority in the province, it will no doubt use the shoddiest materials to build an obnoxious eyesore on the site.
Immediately shovels go into the ground, for construction, property prices for at least a 25km radius of the site will plummet. The mass tourism business in Kemptville will collapse overnight.
When construction is complete, it will be time to lock up our womenfolk and children to spare them from the rape and pillage of escaped convicts. Anything that can be moved should be chained down, along with metal window bars and additional locks to the doors to protect us from larcenous parolees stealing everything in sight
Pestilence will be visited upon Kemptville as waste from the incarcerated will be added to the pure sewage from the town. Similarly, drinking water will be corrupted by touching the lips of felons.
So what should we do fellow citizens of Kemptville. We will of course form a committee. We will ensure the committee has the right gender, ethnic and sexuality mix so nobody can say it is not “representative”. We will of course ensure that it is ideologically pure in that all members must be 100% against the prison. It would not do to have any wishy-washy “I don’t cares” from the silent majority. When we have a committee, we can organize petitions, write to newspapers, parade with banners up and down Prescott Street. We can try and deselect our elected representative to the government who switched from a nice guy to ogre overnight. Finally, perhaps we can convince some brave souls to lay down in front of the backhoes! The purpose of the committee is clear that the Kemptville Prison solution is not the best solution and the government should immediately move the prison to a more suitable site. (A more suitable site is anywhere else in Ontario!)
However, citizens, I do not believe that the government will take the advice and so we will be left with only one solution. The committee will actually have to take real action and relocate themselves to a town where there is no prison or plans for a prison. May I humbly suggest that they might consider now as a good time to go as strange as it might seem, there are people willing to spend large amounts of dollars to actually move to Kemptville even though they know a prison is coming!
William Smith
